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I'd plunk down $600 for a 1TB SSD. I split my work across 2 Samsung SSD drives and a 2TB mechanical drive (for bulk storage) now and it's rather cumbersome. I'd love to consolidate everything onto a single SSD. Looking forward to a review and in-depth opinion on reliability from you guys.Reply

I like the M4, except that it lacks hardware encryption (while Intel's 320, 520, and I assume 330/335 have hardware encryption).

Does the M500 add hardware encryption? (I assume adding a drive password is what locks an encrypted drive...like your password decrypts the drive's key which decrypts the drive, all running on the drive itself unbenounced to the PC it's in).

Other than that, if these work, they look awesome. I love that they've left more spare area, and 960GB in a high quality SSD for <$600?!? That's almost mind boggling!Reply

Yes, they support 256-bit AES in hardware. Also have a bunch of small capacitors so in the event of power it can finish writing anything to NAND. Not a super capacitor, but they have enough to handle the internal buffers.Reply

What about when you get a process shrink? Doesn't the physical size reduce, therefore you might have a better chance to fit 6-8 packages on that PCB. Also if you don't have a big DRAM block, shouldn't you save some space (I can't remember if SandForce doesn't use DDR). Couldn't you use a physically smaller controller and some smart placement of NAND packages to reach higher storage space?Reply

The die size for 20nm NAND stayed roughly the same as the previous generation, but Micron went from 64Gb die to 128Gb die. That's why they can now do 1TB class while still using only eight packages.Reply

Actually, IMFT has a 64Gb 20nm die as well (used in Intel SSD 335 for instance). Compared to 25nm 64Gb die, the 20nm die is around 30% smaller. I'm not sure about the size of 20nm 128Gb die but it's probably a little less than twice the size of 64Gb die (some space savings from bigger page/block size since there are less peripheral circuits between the blocks), which would make it slightly larger than the 25nm 64Gb die.

However, the actual die size is misleading because package sizes are more or less a standard. We are usually dealing with some kind of TSOP or BGA packages and their sizes don't change. This also allows easy PCB designing because you don't have to redesign the PCB if you're moving to smaller lithography NAND.

I guess the main reason why we haven't seen bigger mSATA SSDs is the lack of interest for them. I'm sure you could fit more NAND in mSATA form factor by investing enough on the R&D but honestly that's quite pointless due to the small market.Reply

I guess you are only looking at sequential writes. They look like Samsung 840 non-pro numbers to me, which seems to be selling quite well. And the random IOPS are what really matters for most usages. And they certainly deliver.Reply

I would take the earlier M4 numbers with a bit more skepticism as they generally felt more inflated, particularly on lower capacity drives. Mostly though, I was speaking about maximum performance/IOPS on the 480/960GB drives. 80K/80K is indeed "almost double" 40K/50K, and read/write speeds are up as well. On smaller drives where there are less NAND die to talk to (thanks to the increased die sizes), performance may not always go up, but in general I expect the 120GB M500 to match or exceed M4 128GB performance in all benchmarks.Reply